


Somebody Told Me

by toli-a (togina)



Category: Captain America (Movies), Captain America - All Media Types
Genre: De-Aged Bodies, M/M, Melancholy, Post-Captain America: The Winter Soldier
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-06-09
Updated: 2016-06-09
Packaged: 2018-08-07 18:13:57
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,426
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7724716
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/togina/pseuds/toli-a
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The bad news, as Tony put it, was that the villain of the week had given them the bodies of nineteen-year-old boys.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Somebody Told Me

**Author's Note:**

> Bodies are de-aged to nineteen in this, but everyone's minds (souls, psyches, etc.) remain the age they would be at some unspecified point in the 21st century. The Avengers make a brief appearance, so this is set in some alternate universe where Sam is either absent (or on a mental health vacation), and everyone's living in the Tower.

“What on earth happened?” Pepper shrieked, when the Avengers came tromping into her sitting room at the Tower. At least, they might have been the Avengers. Steve could understand her suspicion, given that she was faced with six tired, dirty people who looked almost nothing like the team she had waved off the helipad hours before, on their way to face the evil wizard of the week.

“Think of it this way,” a slim young man with messy black hair declared, shoulders not yet broad enough to fit his shirt. “The good news is that I now have the sex drive of a nineteen-year-old boy. The bad news is that Shaman Spooky seems to have turned us all into nineteen-year-old boys.”

“Speak for yourself,” Nat disagreed, twirling a finger through wavy, red hair. “He didn’t turn me into a boy.”

“Nineteen,” Steve broke in, wincing when his voice cracked and tipped squeakily into the second syllable. “We’re all nineteen, until someone fixes this.” He was wearing Bruce’s spare Hulk blanket, because the Captain America suit would have swamped him, even with the utility belt notched as tightly as it would go. Everyone else, at least, appeared mostly themselves. Everyone but the man standing hesitantly by the elevators, who had howled with pain when his familiar metal arm morphed to flesh he hadn’t felt in eighty years.

Steve would know Bucky if he were blind, would know him at the end of the world, but it was hard to see his friend so uncomfortable in the skin that Steve knew best. It was hard to turn around and see the Bucky he had lost, when his best friend had shipped off to a war and never come home.

“Phil has his best magic users on this,” Clint promised, looking less imposing in a loose vest and an awful hairstyle that left purple locks going past his shoulders. “They’ll fix it.”

“Until they do,” Tony prompted, moving in on Pepper. Who backed away.

“We are  _ not  _ having sex,” she told him, but she was smiling as she said it, and the rest of the team took that as their cue to leave. With alacrity.

——

“Never thought I’d see you like this again,” Bucky said softly, once they’d stepped onto their own floor and changed into sweatpants that pooled around Steve’s bare feet, t-shirts that sagged to show their collarbones. “I forget, sometimes, how small you were.”

Neither of them mentioned that sometimes Bucky forgot his own name, or what century it was, or how to do anything but scream the tortures of the damned.

“I didn’t forget any of it,” Steve returned, more honestly than he’d intended, and Bucky spared him a searching look with eyes the same color of the sky just before the first ray of sun.

Steve shrugged his thin shoulders, and shifted on the couch until Bucky wrapped an arm around him, pulling him sideways until Steve’s head rested in his lap. Bucky’s body remembered, even if his mind forgot.

“You didn’t have any gun calluses, at nineteen,” Steve told him, running bony fingers over the joints in Bucky’s left hand, clinging to the pulse in its wrist. “Just the ones on your palms, from hauling crates at the docks. You kept trying all these horrible experiments,” he recalled, smiling up at the face of a boy he had loved, so many lives before. “Trying to grow hair on your chest. You’d wake me up every morning with your shirt off – even when it was freezing cold – and ask if I saw any hair.”

“We sat like this,” Bucky said, picking up the thread of the story. “On the old sofa. It was good, because I could rub your chest if the asthma acted up, and you had your good ear to the radio.” Steve nodded, the back of his head digging into Bucky’s thighs. “Your hair was greasy,” he continued, using his right hand to push the blond hair off Steve’s forehead, massaging his scalp.

Steve snorted. “Jerk. It was brilliantined, just like everybody’s hair was back then. But yeah, you would complain that it made your hands soft. Never stopped you from touching it, though.”

“Your hands were soft,” Bucky whispered, and Steve flushed. Of course his hands had been soft: sickly, helpless Steve, too weak to work and too small to win a fight on his own. “They were beautiful. You would draw, when I napped on Sundays, with your fingers curled around the pen. You would chew on your thumb, when you didn’t like the way the pictures came out.”

“I drew you,” Steve admitted, the words rattling in his fragile chest, breathed into the charged air around them. “All the time. It was easier, when you were sleeping.”

“You always woke me up, though. Your hands – you would…” Bucky trailed off, gazing down at Steve with a dark look in his eyes, as if he no longer had the words for gentleness. As if the tattered man peering out of the body of the hopeful, incredible boy he had been couldn’t understand two children in love.

Steve sat up. He crawled onto Bucky’s lap because he could, now, because Bucky could fold Steve in his arms and shield him from the world in a way that he had sacrificed for the body of a perfect man. “I couldn’t keep from touching you,” he said, letting his fingers follow a path they knew by heart. “I would sketch your cheekbones, but then I had to touch them, drag my hands down the line of your jaw. Over your lips, and press my thumb into the dent in your chin.” Bucky swallowed, and Steve ran his soft, girlish fingers over dark lashes and down pale cheeks.

Steve had never shaken the feeling that life after the serum was all a dream. He expected to wake up every morning in the body he had worn for twenty-four years, gasping for breath and able to tuck himself neatly under Bucky’s arm. He remembered every sharp pain in his crooked spine, every wrong thing about this delicate body that had prevented him from joining the Army so he could have been there when Bucky was sent away.

Steve remembered, but Bucky had long forgotten what it was to be a boy.

“You woke up when I got to your mouth,” Steve continued, soothing Bucky with his voice and his fingers, new, twenty-first century habits in nineteen-year-old hands. “Nipped at my fingers if I wasn’t quick enough pulling them away. You never stopped me, though, not ‘til I got to your waist. You were ticklish, there, screamed like a girl and fought dirty to get away.”

Bucky had lost that before the fall. His ribs were still sensitive, but when Steve had tried to tickle him during the war, Bucky had flinched instead of laughing, and jerked away. After -  _ after _ , Hydra burned away any response Bucky might have had to a soft touch. Steve didn’t reach out, now. He didn’t want to know if Bucky would giggle; he couldn’t survive having another memory shattered if Bucky didn’t react at all.

“Tell me more,” Bucky pleaded quietly, circling Steve’s scrawny wrists with hands that he had yet to grow into, at nineteen. Hands that had never killed a man. At nineteen, Bucky was dockyard calluses and bruised knuckles, a Brooklyn boy quick on his feet, quick to leap into the fray.

Bucky never asked for the past, though sometimes Steve caught him flipping through the notebooks that the Smithsonian had returned, or the printed memoirs written decades after the war. He read through reams of impersonal history, but shied from Steve’s stories, as if he were afraid to hear about the man he had been.

“All right,” Steve said, running his hands over Bucky’s short hair, lighter at nineteen from so many days working in the sun. He traced the corners of Bucky’s eyes, his forehead where tension lines had yet to gather. Steve leaned up to kiss Bucky’s cheeks, because he  _ could _ , because he could close his eyes and feel how small he had been, once, how small and how loved. “I’ll tell you.”

And he threaded his hands through Bucky’s – boys’ hands, hands with dirty nails but no blood that wouldn’t wash away. He gazed at the young face in front of him, at the haunted, ancient eyes, and wrapped them both in memories, let them settle for a moment into the skin they wore, the fearless, besotted young men that they had been.


End file.
